The Automobile and the Remaking of Social Space

The automobile was sold as freedom — the open road, the liberation of individual mobility, the conquest of distance. And for many, it delivered. But the car also remade the physical and social geography of the twentieth century in ways its early adopters could not have imagined. American suburbia, with its racial covenants and zoning laws, was built around the assumption that every household would own a car. Public transit systems were dismantled. Cities were redesigned for vehicles, not people. The automobile did not just respond to demand — it restructured the world to make itself necessary.

In the Gulf states, the automobile arrived in tandem with oil wealth and reshaped urban planning on a massive scale. Cities like Riyadh, Dubai, and Doha were designed from the ground up as car cities — vast, low-density sprawls connected by highways, with public space organized around malls and parking structures rather than sidewalks and squares. The car became a marker of modernity and status, while the labor of driving — taxis, delivery, construction transport — was performed overwhelmingly by migrant workers whose own mobility was constrained by the kafala sponsorship system.

The parallel to AI is about infrastructure and lock-in. Just as the automobile restructured physical space to make car ownership a prerequisite for participation in social and economic life, AI is restructuring digital space in ways that may make dependence on specific platforms and systems equally compulsory. When universities adopt AI grading tools, when hospitals deploy AI diagnostic systems, when governments use AI for border control, the technology is no longer optional — it becomes the infrastructure through which essential services are delivered.

Who designs the infrastructure we become dependent on? What happens when the systems organizing our lives are controlled by entities whose interests do not align with ours? The automobile taught us that technologies of freedom can become technologies of constraint — and that by the time we notice, the alternatives have already been dismantled.